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3rd Global Conference
Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease
Monday 5th July - Friday 9th July 2004
St Catherine's College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstract & Papers
Session 11: Constructing
and De-constructing Women’s Bodies
Chair: Philippa Spoel
Green Fingers and Pink Viagra: Female Sexual Dysfunction and Medicalisation
in Contemporary Medical Discourse
Katherine Angel
History and Philosophy of Science Department, Cambridge University, Cambridge,
United Kingdom
In my paper I will discuss the contemporary debate
about Female Sexual Dysfunction, in relation especially to controversies
about medicalisation and the relationship between technology and models
of disease. Recently, much attention has been devoted to female sexual
problems, arguably powered by pharmaceutical companies keen to develop
a drug that, like Viagra, would successfully intervene in sexual problems,
capture the public imagination, and provide massive revenues for its
developers. Heated exchanges in the general and medical press signal
anxieties about the forces motivating a medical understanding of this
condition.
I shall discuss both the factors affecting contemporary medical
and psychiatric views of female sexual problems, and the factors driving
the anti-medicalisation critique – noting along the way how medicalisation
has been variously understood in the last forty years. Part of what is
at stake in the debate about FSD is the question of what kind of causal
models are legitimate in a scientifically adequate medicine. I shall
discuss attitudes in the debate towards, on the one hand, single-cause
and overwhelmingly physiological models and, on the other, multiple-cause
models with psychological and social factors as important nodes in the
causal process. Views about these models implicate attitudes to technology
in disease, and underpin debates – resistant to resolution - about
the distinction between medicine and psychiatry.
I am concerned in my
wider work with the desire within contemporary medicine for single-cause
models of disease, a desire notable in the terrain surrounding a variety
of conditions controversial in respect to causation and categorisation
(chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome and so on), and which relates
to medical models both of the body and of technology. I use mostly material
from the press debate about FSD, where the views of patients, campaigners,
researchers, and doctors collide.
Download Full Conference Paper - 
“Normal gone bad” – Exploring Discourses of Health
and the Female Body in Schools
Hannele Harjunen & Emma
Rich
Researcher, Administration Office/Rehtoraatti, University of Jyväskylä,
Finland & School of Sport & Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University,
Leicestershire, United Kingdom
In recent years it has been argued that the both the formal and informal contexts of education are heavily imbued with a ‘culture of healthism’ which places moral obligation and blame on individuals for their health. The paper explores the ways in which schools draw on particular discourses about the body, health and illness that may attempt to normalize young women’s bodies. In doing so, we bring together data from two separate research projects; the first, conducted in Finland, involved a study of the social construction of obesity and women’s personal experiences of being ‘fat’; the second, conducted in England, explored young women’s experiences of anorexia and/or bulimia. Whilst much has been written about the social construction of both these conditions they are almost always studied separately. Yet they both share a process of being positioned as ‘marginal’ or ‘pathological’ identities that fall outside of the ‘normal’ ‘healthy’ body ideal within western culture, and which are in need of ‘restoration’. Both studies revealed school to be a central place where girls learn the boundaries of the acceptable or ideal female body . More specifically, the paper explores how teachers, school health care and peers ‘read’ the ‘anorexic body’ and the ‘fat body’ and how this is reflected in interactional practice both in the classroom and in more informal peer cultures. In the Finnish study, most of the women who had been fat as a child suggested they had learnt or they had been told directly or implicitly that they were too fat or their bodies were somehow deviant to the norm. The anorexic body was positioned in similar ways as ‘abnormal’ and ‘irrational’. These experiences pointed towards the ways in which schools, despite their best intentions, are implicated in constructing contexts which are inimical to the well being of young women whose bodies are considered ‘abnormal’ or ‘sick’ and ultimately results in a form of discursive constraint in terms of the ways in which young women come to make sense of their bodies, health and selves.
Download Full Conference Paper -
The Construction of Women’s Subjectivity Through
Gynecological Experiences
Dóradjamila Mester
Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration,
Budapest, Hungary
Over the last decade, the social construction of the
female body has become a major focus of theoretical debate and empirical
research
within social sciences. Nevertheless, relatively few empirical studies
deal with the constitution of women’s identity specifically in
the
gynecological context. The importance of gynecological consultations
in
the construction of women’s knowledge about their own body is huge
because the consulting room is one of the places where the discourses
on female body emerge most explicitly in a common and regular
manner. Women’s medical experiences are seen here as produced by
particular discursive practices located in history and society; not by
the ‘truth’ of an independent, materially given object which
can
be ‘discovered’.
In the first section of my paper I am building
up my theoretical
framework by relying on the scholarships of qualitative medical
sociology and women’s studies in which my research is contextualized.
As a part of a larger ongoing project, which basically deals with
discourses within gynecological consultations, in this paper I am
focusing on one particular layer of discourses on the gynecologist-patient
relationship which appear in women‘s magazines. By way
of
mapping current discourses on the female body I textual analyze
articles on gynecological experiences and topics in well characterized,
popular Hungarian women’s magazines from 2003 in which both the
expert and the lay discourses are obviously manifested.
With the findings
of the research I can differentiate among overlapping
discourses which partly contribute to women’s internalization of
patriarchal professional discourses or partly reinforce common
misbelieves around the female body or may offer alternatives
emphasizing the ‘traditional-natural’ aspects of the female
body. Doing
that we can understand better the effects of internalized male
dominant gynecological voices on women’s controversial reactions
and
on their opinions about certain female physical disorders or natural
gynecological conditions (pregnancy, menstruation etc.) and what their
implications are on the current health care system.